Feedback / Roadmap enquiries
Hi There,
Recently got one of your KVMs from your re-seller in Germany for testing, I'm based in the UK. Firstly - When connecting to a standard PC or MAC via the TinyPilot, I thought the experience was great. I found the mouse movements much smoother than the only other HTML KVM I've managed to find (a device from a company called Raritan), and the UI / menus were much slicker, and easier to navigate.
I have a fairly niche set of use cases in mind for these KVMs, off the back of that could I ask you a few questions, about your roadmap, as at the moment they are not quite meeting my needs;
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Any idea whether you'll support relative mouse movements in the future, rather than absolute mouse movements only? When trying to use the KVM to connect to say an iPad or DEX mode Samsung phone the mouse is unusable. Screen and keyboard are fine. I'm fairly sure this is because they don't support absolute mouse mode (from experience playing with the other vendors KVM).
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Any plans to have an option for LDAP integration for authentication to the device, rather than just local users? And as a follow up, different levels of user access, e.g. user only able to access the remote device, not change the KVM settings?
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Is it possible to send the system logs off to say a syslog server?
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Any plans on adding an option in the UI to change the IP address (similar to the hostname change option), rather than having to SSH to the box and manually tweak it there?
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The KVM is set up to be online for various features, for example patching the firmware, setting the IP address to a static one (it's trying to call a script from a web address). Will there be a version of the firmware which is more tailored to an offline environment? i.e local scripts, manual patch uploading?
Many Thanks!
Diego @diegoHello @RH79 - Thank you for posting your questions in our Forum. We love the feedback very much. See below answers to your questions. Thanks.
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We do not have a timeline, as it's a significant amount of work, but it would be possible for TinyPilot to add this. I'm sorry I can't give you a better answer. We might add that feature in the future.
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The answer to your second question is quite similar to the first. These are interesting features that would certainly be appreciated by some users. Unfortunately, and speaking particularly about LDAP, it would require quite a lot of work and it is not in our priorities to add these features in the near future.
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Sending system logs off to a syslog server is totally doable. You would need to run a few configurations, same as you would do with any other Unix/Linux machine. TinyPilot runs on top of Debian Buster. So yes, it is absolutely possible, with minimal work required on your part.
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There are no plans for adding a UI item to change IP address that I am aware of. We do have a FAQ, How do I set a static IP address? - with a script included, to make it super-easy to configure a static IP address. I do understand having it even easier, i.e. in the UI, would be totally awesome. No timeline for this, unfortunately.
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It is not in our plans, but this is quite an interesting request. I'm curious, why would you want everything offline? To use on a restricted network, perhaps?
Hi Diego,
Thanks for the information.
To answer your query - Yeah, as I say it’s quite a niche use case, basically a lab where we can’t have mobile devices because of signal interference, so trying to provide staff with a means of accessing their personal devices at desk, remotely, and the LAN the PCs are on is a closed network.
To be honest though I’d have thought most data centre type use cases would have a similar requirement. I wouldn't necessarily want my data centre management network to be internet facing really. Perhaps accessible via a VPN or whatever, but not direct to the internet. Maybe That’s just from my work background though.
It’s certainly a cool little bit of kit though, might not fit our needs now, but I’ll keep an eye on your site to see how things progress.
Thanks again.
Diego @diego@RH79 - I see! Yeah, I kind of thought of a similar scenario, but thanks for the detailed answer.
Perhaps accessible via a VPN or whatever, but not direct to the internet.
Gotcha! Proxies can be setup within the TinyPilot OS, that would be another way to do it. This is rather easy.
It’s certainly a cool little bit of kit though, might not fit our needs now, but I’ll keep an eye on your site to see how things progress.
Thank you for the kind words and also for your interest in our product :) Stop by anytime with further questions/comments/feedback, it will be a pleasure to read you again. Have a great day ahead!
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In reply toRH79⬆:Michael Lynch @michael2022-08-23 21:09:07.910ZThe KVM is set up to be online for various features, for example patching the firmware, setting the IP address to a static one (it's trying to call a script from a web address). Will there be a version of the firmware which is more tailored to an offline environment? i.e local scripts, manual patch uploading?
Just to add a bit more detail here, we don't have a short-term timeline for this, but we're moving closer to making offline installs and upgrades possible. We're in the process of creating install tarballs that bundle more of the TinyPilot code instead of fetching it from live servers. You can see the latest Community tarball install bundle if you visit:
https://gk.tinypilotkvm.com/community/download/latest
The tarball doesn't contain all dependencies, but we should be able to create one that does in the future if there's demand from our customers.
Any plans on adding an option in the UI to change the IP address (similar to the hostname change option), rather than having to SSH to the box and manually tweak it there?
This is something that's high on our list, but it's still going to be a few months. You can follow progress on our Github ticket.